Chelsea Hotel New York

Overheard on the Chelsea Hotel stairway one recent Sunday: Question: "Is Rita still here?" Reply: "Rita's dead." A pause between footsteps. "Rita was a sweetheart." Only in this hotel could such an exchange take place as calmly as if two people were discussing the weather. But most people don't check out of the Chelsea if they can help it.

Overheard on the Chelsea Hotel stairway one recent Sunday: Question: "Is Rita still here?" Reply: "Rita's dead." A pause between footsteps. "Rita was a sweetheart." Only in this hotel could such an exchange take place as calmly as if two people were discussing the weather. But most people don't check out of the Chelsea if they can help it.

"The Chelsea Girls," Andy Warhol's famous 1966 tribute to dissolute boredom, finally comes to Orange County tonight. The 3 1/2-hour film, with music by the Velvet Underground, follows the catatonic lives of denizens of the Chelsea Hotel in New York. Warhol derails the viewer's conventional notion of time, sealing off the nonevents of the film in a hellish dream world. Is it boring? I bailed a couple of hours into a Los Angeles screening several years ago.

Dr. Roy Walford, the free-spirited UCLA gerontologist who pioneered the idea of restricting food intake to extend life span and practiced the concept rigorously in an effort to live to 120, has died. He was 79. Although he was an accomplished scientist with more than 330 scientific papers and eight books to his credit, Walford was probably better known for the two-year stint he spent with seven other adventurers in Biosphere 2, a self-contained human terrarium near Tucson.